Any.do 2.0 is now available in the Google Play Store, iTunes App Store and on the web — still for free — and has a Premium option that adds custom app themes, location-based task reminders and custom recurring times for tasks. Both versions now support collaboration, although the free option is limited to just two members per task. Here’s a peek at how the elegant app works for single and shared tasks, and this chart compares the free and Premium features.

[youtube=http://youtu.be/gPpHp4Yfs_M]

Any.do is a relatively rare example of an app that first launched on Android and later appeared on iOS. You’d think that approach wouldn’t have much success but the company boasts more than 11 million Any.do users managing tasks in the app. Clearly, it’s a popular app — one of my personal favorites for managing tasks due to the design its helpful daily planning technique. And now it has a potential revenue stream.

Early adopters who sign up for a Premium account in the next 14 days will get a discount, paying either $3 per month or $27 a year for the added features. After the first year, the cost will revert to the standard pricing of $5 per month or $45 a year. If Any.do can convert just five percent of its current user based to a Premium account, it could be looking at nearly $25 million a year for annual subscriptions — not bad for a well-designed task management app that syncs across multiple platforms.

In a terse blog post late Thursday, Moped said it had been acquired by 6Wunderkinder, and that its own service would shut down on 31 December. However, a 6Wunderkinder company spokesperson subsequently said this was a “technology acquisition only” and that the firm had not acquired the Moped brand or hired its team, led by Schuyler Deerman.

“Although we can’t yet share any details on exactly how we will utilise Moped’s real time cross platform messaging in the future, we can say that communication is an essential part of team collaboration,” the spokesperson said in an email.

Moped, which shared investors Earlybird with 6Wunderkinder, started life by positioning itself as a sort of Twitter-direct-messages rival, but it didn’t really have enough to differentiate it from rising platforms such as WhatsApp and Viber. Then it pivoted towards the business market this year, integrating with Dropbox.

Moped frankly didn’t have much of a future, but it’s not hard to see how its functionality could blend well into Wunderlist, and the Wunderlist Pro app in particular. Wunderlist already gained commenting functionality earlier this year. The pro app is aimed at small businesses and other team environments, and a strong messaging and file-sharing feature could help it develop into a more fully-fledged toolkit.

This article was updated at 3.15am PT to reflect the fact that 6Wunderkinder only bought Moped’s source code.

]]>Berlin’s 6Wunderkinder has reportedly raised a $30 million Series B round, with heavyweight Sequoia Capital joining existing investors such as Earlybird and Atomico. 6Wunderkinder makes the popular Wunderlist and Wunderlist Pro task management apps, which Techcrunch says have 6 million users. The company will apparently use its fresh funding to push further into the U.S. market.

]]>Doesn’t it make a certain amount of sense to put calendar events and to-do items together? After all, both have a time-based component to them. That’s exactly what Fantastical did on iOS last year and does again in its latest release, Fantastical 2. The new version is now available in the iTunes App Store for a special launch price of $2.99.

Fantastical 2 is revamped for iOS 7 but retains many of the key features that made its predecessor so popular. In one single view called the “Day Ticker” you can get your daily schedule along with any tasks you have on your plate for the day. Not everyone actually schedules tasks, so if you don’t fall into that category, this may not be an optimal solution. However, I find myself actually getting more things done when I truly manage my tasks instead of keeping them on an ever-growing list.

Images from the slideshow

1 / 5

fantastical 2 weekly

2 / 5

fantastical 2 full month

3 / 5

fantastical 2 dark

4 / 5

fantastical 2 entry

5 / 5

fantastical 2 light

It’s easier to add events or tasks in the new version as well thanks to some improved natural language processing and parsing. Start off by saying “remind me to…..” and you can create a reminder task, for example. Speaking of reminders, you can make them time-based or location-based. And if you want to dictate your tasks, events, alerts or reminders, you can do that too. Including location info in an event will also show a little map preview of the appointment; super handy.

Much like Apple’s own Calendar for iOS, turning your iPhone to landscape mode creates a weekly view. And if Apple’s Calendar supports a calendar service, so too does Fantastical 2: You can use it with Google Calendar, iCloud, and Microsoft Exchange to name a few. Calendar events and reminders will also sync in the background so the app should almost always have your latest information available.

Some who bought Fantastical last year may be put off by having to purchase the next version instead of getting a free update, but the special launch pricing should ease some of that pain. The normal price of Fantastical 2 is $4.99, so you can save $2 by jumping on it early.

]]>In my household, my husband’s the planner and I’m the procrastinator. And while that combination hasn’t been too tricky to navigate for most of our marriage, it can only go downhill when you throw a hunt for a new home and a baby-on-the way into the mix.

Until now, we’ve each had our own approach to keeping our to-dos straight – my husband is a strict “inbox zero” kind of guy and uses his email to manage tasks, while I tend to waffle between simple notes on my iPhone and the latest productivity app Apple tells me I should try. But now that our to-do lists seem to be mushrooming with every month, I’ve been searching for an actual solution for sharing and assigning each other tasks and projects.

Some couples are perfectly happy with chalkboards and post-it notes or shared Google Docs, but if you’re looking for an easy way to manage joint tasks on the go, here are a few apps worth checking out.

Any.do

This was the last to-do app I used on my own and I loved its stripped-down, no-clutter design. When you first open up the app, it looks very basic — almost too basic — but it’s actually as full-featured as they come (and its free). For each task, you can add notes, set a reminder alarm by time and/or location, designate a folder and, importantly, share it with someone else.

Once you add a contact to a task, that person gets a push notification if they’ve downloaded the app (or an email if they haven’t). It then allows both people to share notes within the app, as well as receive notifications when the other completes the task (although this last feature felt a bit delayed for me).

Avocado

When I first heard about this startup, I thought it offered more of a cutesy app for newly-in-love couples than something people could actually use to be productive. But, surprisingly, it does have some useful features.

If you can get over the silly-sounding name, the free app offers some great to-do-tracking features. Every time you add an item to a list, your partner gets a push notification and/or email. And when one of you deletes it (maybe signaling that it’s complete), the other gets an alert.

You can’t set a deadline or reminder alarm for to-dos, which is a drawback. But you could use the calendar feature if you want to make sure your partner doesn’t forget an important event.

Couple

This was another one of those apps for twosomes I pretty much disregarded when it first came out, but it’s actually not bad. Couples can create shared lists and receive updates every time one of them adds or modifies an item. However, the app’s notifications aren’t as detailed as the ones in other apps. For example, it could only let me know that my husband had “updated [our] shared lists,” it wouldn’t tell me what exactly had been added or removed.

Also, like Avocado, it doesn’t allow users to attach reminders to to-do items, but includes a calendar for designating important dates. Both Couple and Avocado let couples message each other within the app, but, for productivity purposes, I don’t really see how that’s any better than using texting features already built into the phone.

Evernote

If you’re one of the many millions of people who are already addicted to Evernote for taking notes and digitizing information, this could be the winner for you — as long as you or your partner is willing to upgrade to a $4.99 per month premium account.

It wasn’t explicitly built for collaborative task management, but as long as one person in the couple can create shared notebooks, both people can create and edit notes. For example, if I upgrade to premium, create a “Family to do” notebook and share it with my husband, both of us can add separate notes for each task and set notification alarms to remind us of deadlines. (With the free accounts, users can only view shared notebooks.)

Unlike other apps, Evernote won’t send push notifications each time one of us adds or edits content (I wish it would, hint hint). But its big upside is that it’s something we both already use, so it’s a solution that could actually stick.

Wunderlist

For a time, this clean-looking app was my to-do tool of choice. And I wasn’t surprised to see that its collaboration features are as smooth as the rest of its software. Using Wunderlist’s free version, users can invite contacts to share a list and then receive notifications each time someone adds or completes an item. They can also add a due date and set a reminder that both people can see.

If you want to add people to the shared lists (like grandparents, nannies or other caregivers), you can upgrade to the $4.99 per month Pro version (which is really meant for small businesses) and get the option to explicitly assign tasks to different people.

The Winner

For us, Evernote ultimately makes the most sense because both my husband and I already use it. We’ll have to pay $5 a month to share lists (and to get other premium services) but it’s just easier to keep our shared to-do lists with other personal and joint notebooks we’ll need to reference.

If we weren’t already Evernote people, however, Wunderlist would be our winner (with Any.do in a very close second). It’s intuitive, easy to use and, I think, it offers the best notification options (it’s the only app of the bunch that lets users set a deadline and other reminders).

The features of Wunderlist Pro will come as no surprise, as 6Wunderkinder accidentally revealed them last month, but here’s the gist anyway: tasks can be assigned among friends or colleagues, and subtasks can now be created. This should make Wunderlist Pro an effective replacement for the axed Wunderkit, which was a project management counterpart to Wunderlist’s task manager.

The Pro version costs $4.99 a month or $49.99 annually, and is available now for iOS devices, OS X and the web. 6Wunderkinder tells me the Android and Windows versions will follow in a week’s time.

“Wunderlist Pro allows you to easily delegate to-dos and effectively track the progress of each task, yet this is just the beginning. There is still a whole lot more to come,” 6Wunderkinder CEO Christian Reber said in a statement.

The first installment of that “whole lot more” will be the ability to attach files to tasks, which can then be shared for collaborative work. Meanwhile, the sharing functionality of the original Wunderlist has also received a boost through the addition of an “action bar” that allows one-click access to email and share lists.

]]>Berlin-based 6Wunderkinder has added a major feature to its Wunderlist task-management service — a browser extension called Add to Wunderlist that lets you save and share web clippings and even emails from the web app versions of Gmail, Outlook and Yahoo Mail.

The extension is available today for Chrome, Firefox and Safari users. It allows the saving of any URL to the service, but also more specific content from sites such as Amazon, eBay, YouTube, Hacker News, IMdB and Twitter – on Amazon, for example, an “Add to Wunderlist” button will show up next to the “Add to wishlist” button if you have the extension installed.

6Wunderkinder was able to add its button to these sites through the use of their APIs, and it has also released the code to help other sites also allow the button’s addition. The content that the service saves differs from site to site (it may include URLs, prices or ratings, for example), but the user can always just highlight any text and hit the button up in the toolbar to save it.

“We definitely have the same kind of strategy,” 6Wunderkinder CEO Christian Reber admitted today. “When we build the product, we definitely say all the time that we want to own every single task … we want to integrate it in every part of your lives, on every device you have.

“We share the same space as Evernote somehow, but Evernote is the main tool for notes and we are the main tool for tasks. We will probably conflict in the future in some places, but the two products can definitely coexist. Personally I use Evernote and Wunderlist. We will see in the future how it will work out — we don’t focus on following what our competitors do.”

]]>Professional users of 6Wunderkinder’s popular Wunderlist task management app look set to get a range of new features, as a “top secret” email to selected customers has revealed.

On Monday the Berlin-based company’s Twitter account briefly spewed out links to a newsletter inviting the intended recipients to sign up early for a Wunderlist Pro account. Judging from the sneaky feature preview allowed by this accident, Wunderlist Pro will give teams more collaborative features – perhaps some of the functionality that was included in the axed Wunderkit project-management product.

According to the newsletter, these are the features to look out for:

Assign to-dos to specific people on your team to know who is responsible for what

An unlimited amount of sub-tasks allows you to split your project in smaller steps no matter how big it is

8 new backgrounds let you style Wunderlist the way you want it

Work seamlessly together in teams by sharing lists and tasks with an unlimited amount of people on all devices and platforms

Get access to latest beta versions and be amongst the first to use new features

A spokeswoman for the company told me that the newsletter was only supposed to reach “a small group of 5,000 users” and that it was sent out to help 6Wunderkinder figure out its pricing strategy for Wunderlist Pro – as it stands, the quoted price in the newsletter I saw was $4.99 per month (others apparently saw $3.99 and other prices, so the team was clearly testing out various options).

If all goes well, she added, Pro accounts will become available in April.

]]>A nifty little update to one of my favorite free task management smartphone apps makes it even better. Both the latest iPhone and Android versions of Any.DO help bring focus to daily tasks with a fun feature called Any.DO Moment. Instead of manually waiting for — and possibly putting off — a time to review your tasks, Any.DO Moment helps plan your day every morning.

The new feature is configurable to run at a specific time on any day of the week. When that time hits, the application opens and quickly walks through all of your open tasks.

For each of these, you simply tap the appropriate planning option: Today, Later, Done, Delete. Choosing Today or Later provides additional options for specific times or future dates. Any.DO will then juggle the tasks around to the days of your choice, or remove any tasks you mark as complete. The end result? You’ve done a daily task review and have a better handle on what needs to be done today:

[vimeo http://www.vimeo.com/59882957 w=600&h=337]

Not only does the Any.DO Moment feature help bring focus to the day; it does so in way that’s fast, intuitive and somewhat fun. And this approach can help improve productivity, based on Any.DO’s own internal data. Says Any.DO CEO Omer Perchik:

“We’ve been testing the feature secretly in the past month and we’re seeing over 30 percent increase in engagement and over 20 percent improvement in retention. The feedback is simply remarkable. We keep receiving emails from people who say they feel far more organized and relaxed since they started using the Any.DO Moment. “

More organized and relaxed? Yup, I can see that after using Any.DO Moment on my mobile phones.

I’m no longer looking at my task list as an annoyance, but more as a tool to get things done. Instead of being overwhelmed with an ever-growing list of activities, I feel like I’m in better control of my activities. A scheduled daily review of tasks — good practice regardless of the tool involved — combined with a fast, simple mobile interface definitely make it easier to get things done.

]]>The task-management market is an area of growing interest. Its growth is propelled in part by users’ needs to coordinate with teams via mobile. In this case, heavier-weight solutions like Yammer, IBM Connections, Podio, and other work media collaboration platforms don’t always suffice.